According to a study reported by the Associated Press, Indiana is 4th in the nation in terms of jailing its kids.

Indiana’s 2006 incarceration rate of 415.4 per 100,000 juveniles ages 10 and older trailed only Wyoming (606.1), South Dakota (564.4) and Florida (451.8), the nonprofit, nonpartisan Every Child Matters Education Fund reported in “Geography Matters: Child Well-Being in the States.”

Vermont, at 72.4 jailed juveniles per 100,000, had the lowest rate.

Pansy liberal Vermonters and their gay civil unions have weakened their resolve to jail their families. What kind of family values are those?

Michael Petit, the group’s president, said Indiana’s high incarceration rate stemmed at least partially from the state’s poor ranking in other areas examined in the report, such as child-welfare expenditures, infant mortality and births to teenage mothers.

This looks like a pay-me-now or pay-me-later kind of situation. Hoosiers can typically be expected to go with the “pay-me-later” option since the money is spent in the form of punishment; a kind of outreach with which we are much more comfortable than anything that looks like a handout. It’s our Puritan heritage, I suppose. On the up-side, I guess we can hope that sending them to jail early puts them straight and keeps them from being criminals as adults. But, that’s not my sense of things.

Hunter has another one worth reading. (The back story is that Chris Matthews and David Shuster thought there was something politically noteworthy and significant about Obama declining coffee in favor of orange juice at an Indiana diner.)

The problem is that it is difficult to truly get angry over, anymore, because it is too predictable; the joke has been played too many times, and increasingly badly with each telling. I can understand why a presidential candidate doing badly at bowling would be a fun, two-minute diversion from weightier matters. And I can understand why a presidential candidate speaking imprecisely about a difficult political issue would become political news. The orange juice thing, where we’re trying to pin an “elitist” label on someone because they asked for orange juice instead of coffee?

No. That was the point where the wires crossed, and shorted. There is a point in which a triviality becomes less than trivial, less than banal, and becomes, to use the most technical term for it, deeply and abrasively stupid. There is no spin possible that turns “asking for orange juice” into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.

[tags]orange juice watch[/tags]

I wanted to link to this, just for the title: John Yoo on the Neoconstitution. Gene Healy analyzes John Yoo and his torture memos.

David Cole has put it, Yoo “was the right person in the right place at the right time…. Here was someone who had made his career developing arguments for unchecked power, who could cut-and-paste from his law review articles into memos that essentially told the president, ‘You can do what you want.’”

In the memo released last week, once again we see a breathtakingly narrow interpretation of what constitutes torture under US law. To rise to the level of torture, the abuse must, Yoo argues, inflict pain equivalent to that associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” Presumably, the rack qualifies under that definition, but hey, what about the thumbscrew?

Such questions ultimately don’t matter much under Yoo’s analysis, because, in his view, Congress lacks the constitutional power to prevent the president from ordering torture: “Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President.” As Yoo sees it, telling the executive branch not to abuse prisoners is like telling the CINC what weapons can be used to take a hill occupied by the enemy: “Congress can no more interfere with the President’s conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.”

These people are worms.

Lincoln was assassinated 143 years ago today. That turned him from a historical figure into a mythological one. I don’t know others experience, but growing up and learning about the United States, it seemed like Lincoln and Washington were on a different plane from the rest.

John Wilkes Booth is properly recalled as a scoundrel. For all his pretensions toward heroism and gentility, he shot a man in the back of the head and ran.

(H/t Doghouse Riley who has this tagged as part of “Treason in Defense of Slavery” month.)

This weather is starting to wear on me. It was snowing a little bit when I let the dogs out last night. Cold and wet all weekend. Below freezing this morning. It’s the middle of April for crying out loud. This has been one tough old winter. Knowing Indiana weather, that probably means we’ll get a day or two of spring, and then it’ll rocket up to a humid 90 for a few months.

Michael Malik, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has a write-up cataloging Carroll County’s financial problems. Most is stuff that’s been documented before: having to cut $1.8 million due to an accounting error in 2004; cut 3 Sheriff’s Deputies; down to 2 ambulances for the entire county; and loss of employers Chromcraft Remington and Globe Valve. The recent property tax restructuring bill will force additional cuts:

The city of Delphi will lose nearly $470,400 in 2010 as a result of recent state legislation aimed at providing property tax relief.

The county will lose an estimated $71,000 in 2009 and $174,000 in 2010 because of the state’s property tax restructuring, according to estimates by the Legislative Services Agency.

To make matters worse, the county recently learned it will not be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more than $130,000 in costs resulting from winter flooding.

The County seems to be pinning its hopes on completion of the Hoosier Heartland Highway, currently a 4 lane highway connecting Logansport to Fort Wayne. The last leg, from Logansport to Lafayette via Delphi. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2010.

One hundred and sixty-seven years ago today, South Carolina became “First in Treason” — the state has not yet seen fit to put that on their license plates. On April 12, 1861, South Carolinian traitors opened fire on the 127 United States soldiers at Fort Sumter. They fired on their own country’s fort for 33 straight hours. More than 1/2 million Americans would die in the resulting attempts to put down the rebellion.

Eugene Robinson has an excellent column on Iraq in today’s Washington Post. He suggests that Bush’s plan for Iraq is simply to run out the clock. Then it’s someone else’s problem. Certainly there seems to be no end game in sight; not even a real vision of what an acceptable “end” might look like. For all of the talk of “victory” we hear from Bush supporters, nobody is really describing “victory” in a way that would let us recognize it if it punched us in the face.

Robinson makes clear that he does not blame Petraeus or Crocker on their evasiveness. They are doing their jobs which, in part, is to follow the marching orders coming from the civilian leadership in the Bush administration. They have been tasked with explaining the inexplicable.

Of course, Bush long ago lost any credibility with Congress and the American people on Iraq. It’s understandable that he hides behind Petraeus’s breastplate of medals and Crocker’s thatch of gray hair, sending these loyal and able public servants to explicate the inexplicable: What realistic goal is the United States trying to achieve in Iraq? And in what parallel universe is this open-ended occupation making our nation safer?

Even the most basic question of any war is undefined: Who is the enemy? It was almost painful listening to Petraeus as he faced reporters yesterday and was asked whether Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were friend or foe. His tortured answer, translated into English, was yes.

In 2003, when Bush launched this elective war, the enemy was Saddam Hussein’s wack-job regime. The dictator and his minions were quickly defeated, but then U.S. forces faced two new enemies — al-Qaeda in Iraq (which we created by invading the country and destroying its brutal government) and a popular insurgency based in the country’s Sunni minority (ditto).

Having midwifed these monsters, the Decider told us we had to stay in Iraq to slay them. What actually happened, though, was that Sunni tribal leaders, many of whom were participants in the anti-American insurgency, decided they had had enough of the al-Qaeda fighters’ Taliban-like ways — and also saw that they were in danger of being marginalized by the Shiite majority. This so-called Awakening began before Bush’s troop escalation, which was artfully labeled a “surge.” It’s not going out on a limb to predict that the Awakening will last precisely as long as the Awakened believe it is in their interest.

Some al-Qaeda combatants remain, however, and the insurgency is not totally quiescent. Meanwhile, the struggle among armed Shiite factions for power and wealth has intensified. It’s a messy situation, to be sure, but there’s no way to call it a war anymore. Our presence in Iraq is an occupation, pure and simple. As in any occupation, the “enemy” consists of people who don’t want the occupying troops in their country — and also people who do want the occupying troops in their country, as long as they see some political advantage in having those troops there to attack.

That brings us to an ad on YouTube.

Iraq: Six Months At A Time

Is Will Statom really saying that his assault on a reporter was a premeditated effort to draw attention to his disagreement with the timing of a meeting of the Delaware County Election Board? Statom says that the meeting, publicized by the Star Press in advance, hadn’t complied with the notice requirements of the public access laws. Statom is one of the Republican members in the Delaware County voter registration office.

“It (the attack on Werner) wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t promoted it,” Statom said. “When you promote illegal activities, there’s ramifications.”

. . .

“I was wrong in what I did, but at some point there’s got to be an attention-getter,” said Statom, also the secretary of the Delaware County Republican Central Committee.

Any criminal defense attorneys out there who can tell me whether this makes it easier or harder to defend Statom’s case and/or get him a better plea?

Statom went on to punch Barry Welsh, Democratic candidate for Indiana’s 6th Congressional District, in the face. Statom says that was “an accident.” Whoopsie.

Martin Crutsinger, writing for the Associated Press, reports that the mid-year federal budget deficit is at an all time high. Hooray recession! Hooray Iraq War! Hooray Bush Tax Cuts! Hooray “Stimulus” Package!